Étiquette : scientific communication

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Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs

« Introduction :  Open Access and licenses are closely intertwined. Both Creative Commons (CC) and Open Access seek to restore the balance between the owners of creative works and prospective users. Apart from the legal issues around CC licenses, we could look at role of intermediaries whose work is enabled through CC licenses. Does licensing documents under Creative Commons increase access and reuse in a direct way, or is access and reuse amplified by intermediaries?

OAPEN Library and DOAB The OAPEN Library contains books available under both open licenses, for example Creative Commons, as well as books that are published under terms that only allow for personal use. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) functions as an intermediary, offering aggregation services exclusively focused on books with an open license.

Methods: Downloads are used as a proxy for the use of books in the OAPEN Library. The data set that this paper analyses data that was captured over a period of 33 months. During this time, 1734 different books were made available through the OAPEN Library: 855 books under a Creative Commons license and 879 books under a more restrictive regime. The influence of open licenses, aggregation in DOAB, and subject and language are evaluated.

Results :  Once the effects of subject and language are taken into account, there is no evidence that making books available under open licenses results in more downloads than making books available under licenses that only allow for personal use. Yet, additional aggregation in the DOAB has a large positive effect on the number of times a book is downloaded.

Conclusion : The application of open licenses to books does not, on its own, lead to more downloads. However, open licenses pave the way for intermediaries to offer new discovery and aggregation services. These services play an important role by amplifying the impacts of open access licensing in the case of scholarly books. »

URL : Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1187

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The Educational Value of Truly Interactive Science Publishing

« Interactive Scientific Publishing (ISP) has been developed by the Optical Society of America with support from the National Library of Medicine at NIH. It allows authors to electronically publish papers which are linked to the referenced 2D and 3D original image datasets. These image datasets can then be viewed and analyzed interactively by the reader. ISP provides the software for authors to assemble and link their source data to their publication. But more important is that it provides readers with image viewing and analysis tools. The goal of ISP is to improve learning and understanding of the presented information. This paper describes ISP and its effect on learning and understanding. ISP was shown to have enough educational value that readers were willing to invest in the required set–up and learning phases. The social aspects of data sharing and the enlarged review process may be the hardest obstacles to overcome. »

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.201

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Hybrid Review: Taking SoTL Beyond Traditional Peer Review for Journal Publication

« Developments in emergent technology offer innovative solutions for facilitating a hybrid review process; we examine a unique combination of private–peer and open–public review uniquely relevant for disseminating the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) through development of the Journal of Instructional Research (JIR). An analysis of the hybrid review process (combining the strengths of traditional peer review with an integrative public review process) revealed substantial reviewer participation that contributed to a well–rounded, engaged review process. Public review feedback constructively addressed the value and relevance of the implications, methodology, content and written quality of the manuscripts; an additional layer of private, peer review further refined the manuscripts to determine suitability for publication. This, in turn, created a space where refinement of content, structure, and design of SoTL research was achieved through an interactive process of scholarly inquiry and dialogue. »

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.202

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Peer review: still king in the digital age

« The article presents one of the main findings of an international study of 4,000 academic researchers that examined how trustworthiness is determined in the digital environment when it comes to scholarly reading, citing, and publishing. The study shows that peer review is still the most trustworthy characteristic of all. There is, though, a common perception that open access journals are not peer reviewed or do not have proper peer-review systems. Researchers appear to have moved inexorably from a print-based system to a digital system, but it has not significantly changed the way they decide what to trust. They do not trust social media. Only a minority – although significantly mostly young and early career researchers – thought that social media are anything other than more appropriate to personal interactions and peripheral to their professional/academic lives. There are other significant differences, according to the age of the researcher. Thus, in regard to choosing an outlet for publication of their work, young researchers are much less concerned with the fact that it is peer reviewed. »

URL : http://ciber-research.eu/download/20140120-Peer_review-Learned_Publishing_2015.pdf

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How scholars implement trust in their reading, citing and publishing activities: Geographical differences

« In an increasingly digital environment, many factors influence how academic researchers decide what to read, what to cite, where to publish their work, and how they assign trust when making these decisions. This study focuses on how this differs according to the geographical location of the researcher, specifically in terms of the country’s level of development. Data were collected by a questionnaire survey of 3650 authors who had published articles in international journals. The human development index (HDI) was used to compare authors’ scholarly behavior. The findings show that researchers from less developed countries such as India and China (medium HDI) compared to those in developed countries, such as the USA and UK (very high HDI) are more reliant on external factors and those criteria that are related to authority, brand and reputation, such as authors’ names, affiliation, country and journal name. Even when deciding where to publish, the publisher of the journal is more important for developing countries than it is for researchers from the US and UK. Scholars from high HDI countries also differ in these aspects: a) they are less discriminatory than authors from developing countries in their citation practices; b) for them the fact that a source is peer reviewed is the most important factor when deciding where to publish; c) they are more negative towards the use of repositories and social media for publishing and more skeptical about their potential for increasing usage or reaching a wider audience. »

URL : http://ciber-research.eu/download/20141207-LISR_Trust.pdf

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The “total cost of publication” in a hybrid open-access environment: Institutional approaches to funding journal article-processing charges in combination with subscriptions

« As open-access (OA) publishing funded by article-processing charges (APCs) becomes more widely accepted, academic institutions need to be aware of the “total cost of publication” (TCP), comprising subscription costs plus APCs and additional administration costs. This study analyzes data from 23 UK institutions covering the period 2007–2014 modeling the TCP. It shows a clear rise in centrally managed APC payments from 2012 onward, with payments projected to increase further. As well as evidencing the growing availability and acceptance of OA publishing, these trends reflect particular UK policy developments and funding arrangements intended to accelerate the move toward OA publishing (“Gold” OA). Although the mean value of APCs has been relatively stable, there was considerable variation in APC prices paid by institutions since 2007. In particular, “hybrid” subscription/OA journals were consistently more expensive than fully OA journals. Most APCs were paid to large “traditional” commercial publishers who also received considerable subscription income. New administrative costs reported by institutions varied considerably. The total cost of publication modeling shows that APCs are now a significant part of the TCP for academic institutions, in 2013 already constituting an average of 10% of the TCP (excluding administrative costs). »

URL : The “total cost of publication” in a hybrid open-access environment

DOI: 10.1002/asi.23446

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How Digital Are the Digital Humanities? An Analysis of Two Scholarly Blogging Platforms

« In this paper we compare two academic networking platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses, to show the distinct ways in which they serve specific communities in the Digital Humanities (DH) in different national and disciplinary contexts. After providing background information on both platforms, we apply co-word analysis and topic modeling to show thematic similarities and differences between the two sites, focusing particularly on how they frame DH as a new paradigm in humanities research. We encounter a much higher ratio of posts using humanities-related terms compared to their digital counterparts, suggesting a one-way dependency of digital humanities-related terms on the corresponding unprefixed labels. The results also show that the terms digital archive, digital literacy, and digital pedagogy are relatively independent from the respective unprefixed terms, and that digital publishing, digital libraries, and digital media show considerable cross-pollination between the specialization and the general noun. The topic modeling reproduces these findings and reveals further differences between the two platforms. Our findings also indicate local differences in how the emerging field of DH is conceptualized and show dynamic topical shifts inside these respective contexts. »

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/journal.pone.0115035.pdf

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115035